Are Too Many Vancouver Progressives Running for Mayor?

Recent public opinion polls show that as unpopular as Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and his A Better City Vancouver, or ABC, party are, they still have enough support to eke out a second term on council.

With three weeks to go before the Sept. 11 deadline for candidate registration, there are already eight mayoral candidates declared to run in the Oct. 17 municipal election.

The summer polls show that this leaves Vancouver’s left-, centre- and right-leaning parties in danger of splitting the vote and clearing the way for ABC to reclaim the mayor’s seat and at least some seats on council.

This past spring, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE, the Green Party of Vancouver and OneCity negotiated a self-imposed limit of 13 candidates each across city council, school board and park board. They also pledged to narrow down the mayor race to just one candidate among them before the end of summer.

“The progressive wing of politics in Vancouver, it’s a three-headed monster at the moment,” said Stewart Prest, a lecturer in the political science department at the University of British Columbia.

Having two of the three current progressive mayoral candidates step down would mean progressives would stop competing among themselves, Prest said. They could then start competing with the polls’ other front-runners: ABC and the Vancouver Liberals and mayoral candidate Kareem Allam.

It’s a good idea to take opinion polls on how people intend to vote with a grain of salt, said Prest. Especially as the results are from nearly three months before the election.

“But they definitely give us an indication of where people are thinking, and to what degree people are paying attention,” he said.

“We know that there is a certain amount of frustration with the incumbent, ABC. But that there is still a core constituency supporting them that more or less lines up with observations that we have outside the polling. So that’s another reason to accept that this is a valid result.”

Although the majority of the polls’ respondents were undecided voters, Green Party mayoral candidate Pete Fry and his fellow council candidates polled higher than their progressive peers in COPE and OneCity Vancouver.

For some poll questions, the Greens and Fry ranked even higher than all the other mayoral candidates and parties, Sim and the ABC council candidates included.

This speaks to Fry’s and the Green Party’s longevity in municipal politics, Prest said.

COPE is a much older municipal party than the Green Party of Vancouver. But unlike COPE, Fry and the Greens have consistently won council seats since 2017.

OneCity’s “confrontational” approach to the negotiations among the three parties earlier this year may have also affected how voters view mayoral candidate William Azaroff, Prest added.

“Let’s say Pete Fry is the one who remains standing and goes into the election with the staunch support of these two other parties,” Prest said. “That sends a strong signal to voters that you should look at this candidate if your values broadly align with the Greens, or OneCity or COPE.”

Although summer technically stretches to Sept. 21, it’s not uncommon for people to declare Labour Day weekend as the unofficial end of summer.

So The Tyee checked in with COPE, OneCity and the Greens to see how negotiations are going and when a decision may be announced.

‘The unity process remains unresolved’

The Green Party has enough confidence in its candidate to have agreed to an independently run Oct. 10 fundraising event that takes place a week before the election, and presumably after the parties reach a mayoral candidate decision. The event centres on Fry meeting with local business leaders as a candidate for Vancouver mayor.

But those public opinion polls that appear to favour the Greens over other progressive parties are nearly a month old now. And in communications with The Tyee, the Greens, COPE and OneCity made it clear that while discussions are still underway, no agreement on their unifying progressive mayoral candidate has been reached yet.

The Greens declined our interview request. Instead, in an emailed statement to The Tyee, executive director Nick Poppell said the party will not be negotiating in the media. But he did say they are taking the discussions among the parties seriously.

“The Vancouver Greens have approached discussions about progressive co-operation in good faith, with a genuine desire to find a path toward a singular mayoral candidate who can defeat Ken Sim,” Poppell’s email reads.

“We continue to hear strong support for Pete Fry as the candidate best positioned to defeat Ken Sim, alongside growing frustration from voters that the unity process remains unresolved. The Greens have put written proposals on the table and remain prepared to consider written proposals from others.”

In separate interviews with The Tyee, both COPE mayoral candidate Stephanie Allen and OneCity board member Hermender Singh Kailley say they are taking the polls’ results with the recommended grains of salt.

“Polling is definitely one thing to look at, but I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing we look at when we go into these negotiations,” said Singh Kailley, who sits on OneCity’s negotiation team.

When the parties’ representatives spoke to The Tyee last spring, they indicated volunteer numbers and money raised, among other factors, would also be considered when making a decision.

“Everybody probably wants to use their strengths,” said Allen, referring to the three parties’ negotiating teams.

“We are having very open and honest, good-faith discussions,” Singh Kailley added. “We’ve got 17,000 doors knocked since May 16. We’ve canvassed 19 of Vancouver’s 27 neighbourhoods. We’ve got over 4,800 OneCity members. There’s over 1,400 people that are on our current volunteer list.”

As to when the decision will be made, Allen told The Tyee she understood the three parties want to reach a decision before the Sept. 11 candidate registration deadline.

“I have hope that we’ll get there,” she said.

But Singh Kailley was more cautious about giving an exact date.

“We’re not really putting a deadline to it, as long as we’re having good, constructive, ongoing talks. I think in the next few weeks, those will be getting more intense,” he said, adding “towards the end of the summer” is an accurate timeline.

‘Voters really do need a certain amount of simplicity’

Allen said COPE’s strengths lie in the party’s values, including “taking back the city from the rich.” Those strengths also lie in its spring 2025 council byelection victory in which COPE Coun. Sean Orr defeated the ABC and Green Party candidates to win a seat, alongside OneCity Coun. Lucy Maloney.

“I think we have the ground game. We have 200 lead volunteers right now. We’ve got 25 canvasses a week happening. Our petitions on various policy platforms have thousands of signatures,” Allen said.

“We’ve got this momentum behind us, I think, also, because there’s this larger conversation happening in the culture around what democracy is supposed to do for people that are not rich.”

Because the party has a stated policy of not accepting developer money and has a base of majority working-class supporters, COPE’s fundraising capabilities may pale in comparison to those of the other two parties, she added.

On the other hand, Singh Kailley told us OneCity has raised over $278,000 in the last year.

“ABC will have significant financial resources behind it,” he added. “So a progressive campaign has to demonstrate that it can raise the resources required to compete.”

For his part, political scientist Prest said it would behoove the progressive parties to pare down their total number of council candidates, too. OneCity is running five council candidates for the 10-seat city council, while the Greens and COPE are running four council candidates each.

“They really are going to be doing themselves, collectively, a disservice. Because voters really do need a certain amount of simplicity and guidance in navigating what is a notoriously complex ballot in Vancouver,” he said, adding voters may not be able to tell the progressive parties apart.

But Allen rejects that premise, noting we should be having a conversation about centrist and right-wing parties splitting their votes, instead of just looking at the progressive parties.

“We have our party, and we’re very distinct from the Greens and OneCity in our policies and platform,” she said.

“COPE’s policies are... based on socialist thinking around restricting the power of the super wealthy. We stand alone in that.”

If the three parties do come to an agreement, COPE will throw its support behind whoever is chosen as the final mayoral candidate, Allen said.

OneCity’s Singh Kailley was more cautious in his response but ultimately agreed that his party is open to supporting another party’s candidate.

“I’m not going to prejudge the process publicly. But we’re at the negotiating table because we genuinely are trying to find the path to one progressive candidate,” he said.

“If our position was William or nothing, then there really wouldn’t be any point to ongoing negotiations.”